Review of “Loneliness and Longing: Conscious and Unconscious Aspects,” Edited by Brent Willock, Lori C. Bohm, and Rebecca Coleman Curtis

While I was in the next room, I heard a child who was afraid of the dark call out: “Do speak to me, Auntie! I'm frightened!” “Why, what good would that do? You can't see me.” To this the child replied: “If someone speaks, it gets lighter.”

—Freud, 1917, as cited in Tedeschi, 2012, p. 103

This lovely parable, quoted by two authors in this remarkable collection of essays (Willock et al., 2012), perfectly captures the existential terror of knowing one's separateness and the hope that interacting with others can give the lie to that knowledge. Can a voice

light up a room? Is such a light a true light or a necessary illusion? Are we essentially alone, joined to others only in desperate fantasy, or are we at our very core in union with others, beset by mere fantasies of separateness and the inevitable annihilation that would follow such an impossibility? These questions emerge from the two extremes of psychoanalytic theory: the classical drive/conflict model versus the intersubjective systems model. Despite the fact that the notion of “loneliness” floats between these poles like a restless spirit, in the nearly 100 years following the publication of Freud's parable, little has been written on the subject of loneliness in the literature. The classical and early object relations thinkers focus more on intrapsychic phenomena than on the interpersonal longing implicit in the idea of loneliness, whereas the more recent relational psychoanalysts and intersubjective systems theorists are more interested in dyadic enactments or emergent phenomena in the intersubjective field than in the skull-bound meanderings of the lonely soul. As Roger Frie (2012, p. 36) eloquently put it,

The challenge is that when selfhood is conceptualized as relational or social in nature, it becomes difficult to account for our basic sense of aloneness and states of loneliness. Similarly,